(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

________________________________
 From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 9:11 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
 



I just think caring about those who are boorish and guilty is a waste of effort - their punishment is to be shunted off - to hang out with their own kind.  It is the criminal who makes a hell of jail and incarceration for other criminals.

The system is emasculated.  When I was 4 years old we lived in a non-english speaking country where a blond American boy was a target of violence.  Once I was beaten by a group, my head left severely lacerated.  I saw them make geese smoke cigarettes.  The cruelty of humanity is real and it needs to be deterred with VIOLENCE.

Perhaps 10 times in my life I have been walking by somewhere and heard "faggot" under someone's breath.  EVERY time, I turn and look them in the eye and start a confrontation.  "Say it again."  Only once have they not backed down and squirmend and had fear in their eyes, and I am a very small man.  It is the look of sheer and utter hatred they see in my eye - they know that violence is going to be the immediate and swift consequence of their nonsense, and they repent.

The violent mentality is fascinating - there is no greater joy than being hit by a man and knowing that he cannot hurt you.  That is power.  Power and its enforcement or some absolute moral code are the only thing that can keep these kind of men in line.  Have you never seen the leer, the wicked smile, on the face of Roberto Duran?  I know why he's smiling, and so do these violent criminals.  An emasculated justice system can never truly cope with those who are still feral at heart, and nothing on earth can change them if they do not want to change.  It is only fear that will keep them behaving, and swift pain that they cannot endure.

---I think the proportion of people for whom this---and only this---works is miniscule. On the one hand you have people who can be reached other ways if they are treated with some degree of dignity. On the other you have an even tinier minority of people who cannot be reached at all by any degree of violence. 

No one actually does care about such people as this, so I'm not sure why that point always must be made. It's irrelevant to my point: that state violence can itself break the social contract. When the state murders, it loses its legitimacy and ceases to be a state. When the state inflicts arbitrary violence on some, it asserts the right to arbitrarily inflict it on others.

I am perpetually baffled as to why Americans are so willing to set aside these basic lessons that inform their national constitution.
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